Matt
Drudge: world's most powerful journalist and the bane of CNN

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Matt
Drudge

By Toby Harnden in Washington

12:01AM
GMT 28 Feb 2008

Ten
years ago, he was a reclusive, pasty-faced 31-year-old who,
bashing away on his laptop in his grungy Hollywood apartment, shot
to prominence when he threatened to bring down Bill Clinton's
presidency by breaking news of theMonica
Lewinskyscandal.

Now,
Matt Drudge owns a luxurious Mediterranean-style stucco house on
Rivo Alto Island in Florida's Biscayne Bay, a condominium at the
Four Seasons in Miami and is said to drive a black Mustang. He
remains an elusive, mysterious figure but the internet pioneer is
arguably the single most powerful journalist – though his
detractors even deny that is his occupation - in the world.

Drudge
is still an outsider, contemptuous of the cosy relationships and
closed-door deals that keep the ordinary person from being privy
to the secrets of the Establishment. He is the reason why people
across the globe are now reading about Prince Harry serving in
Afghanistan after he shattered a blackout agreed between Fleet
Street and Buckingham Palace.

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This
week, he posted a photograph of Barack Obama dressed in the tribal
garb of a Somali elder during a 2006 trip to Africa, claiming it
had been emailed by a member of Hillary Clinton's campaign. It
appeared to be a brazen attempt to fuel rumours that her rival was
a dangerous Muslim.

Within
minutes, the photograph was the talk of Washington news rooms and
New York television studios. BlackBerry messages flew back and
forth between reporters and political operatives. The story spread
across the worldwide web as bloggers weighed in on a juicy item
that was suddenly topping the news agenda.

Welcome
to the world of the Drudge Report. A world in which the successor
to Walter Cronkite and Bob Woodward is a loner with no university
education or journalistic background. He is now surreptitiously
courted by the media and political elites that once derided him
but now fear he has the power to change the course of an American
election.

The
Lewinsky scandal and the 2008 presidential campaign are the
bookends to what could be described as the Drudge decade. At the
start, he was the antagonist who came from nowhere – Bill Clinton
initially fumbled the site's name, calling it the Sludge Report.
By the end, he had become Hillary Clinton's weapon of choice
against Mr Obama.

Just
as he revealed details of Bill Clinton's tawdry affair with Miss
Lewinsky while "Newsweek" editors agonised over whether to publish
the story, Drudge posted the news of Prince Harry's front-line
service against the Taliban on-line without regard to any
niceties. Within an hour, Buckingham Palace had lifted the embargo
and Prince Harry was the lead item on CNN.

It
all seems a long way from Matthew Nathan Drudge's days as a gifted
but directionless schoolboy growing up in the Washington DC suburb
of Takoma Park, Maryland.

The
son of divorced parents who lived with his mother, he would, he
said later, wander past ABC News headquarters and "daydream" of
being on the inside, "stare up at the Washington Post newsroom
over on 15th Street, look up longingly, knowing I'd never get in".

After
stints at a 7-Eleven store and at McDonald's, odd jobs as a
telemarketer and New York grocery store assistant, he gravitated
to Los Angeles in 1989, attracted by the intersection between
media and celebrity that was to become the rich seam he mined to
achieve his success.

He
worked as a runner on the game show "The Price is Right" before
landing a job at the gift shop at CBS Studios – a window into
Hollywood – and rising to become its manager.

By
1994, his father Bob, a former therapist and social worker, was
worried that the self-described "aimless teen" was becoming a
directionless adult. He gave him a Packard-Bell computer in the
hope that it might spur him on to achieve more.

The
following year, Drudge the elder founded refdesk.com, a site that
describes itself as indexing "quality, credible and timely
resources that are free and family-friendly" and which Colin
Powell, the former US Secretary of State, uses as his home page.

Drudge
the younger chose a different path. He threw his energies into
producing an email newsletter filled with snippets of gossip and
rambling steam-of-consciousness opinion. By 1996, he was focusing
more on politics, charging an annual $10 fee to his subscribers –
which grew from 1,000 to 85,000 between 1995 and 1997.

Today,
the Drudge Report attracts more than 600 million visits a month.
With an old-fashioned typeface, Drudge primarily links to stories,
though he still breaks news using his trademark flashing siren
over a banner headline.

So
much internet traffic can be directed to an item linked to by
Drudge that unprepared websites have been known to collapse under
the strain.

For
politicians, the effect is akin to a needle injecting information
into the media bloodstream. A positive story can give a shot of
adrenaline to a flagging campaign. More commonly, negative
information can be like a dose of poison being administered.

It
has been Republicans who have most assiduously courted Drudge, a
conservative populist who passionately opposes abortion and
despises taxes. Research directors of the Republican National
Committee have made pilgrimages to Miami to pay homage to Drudge.

A
2005 dinner at the fashionable Miami steakhouse Forge in which Tim
Griffin, the outgoing RNC research director, introduced his
successor Matt Rhoades to Drudge is already the stuff of political
lore. Rhoades went on to become communications supremo to Mitt
Romney, whose opponents in the 2008 presidential race noted
frequently that negative stories about them appeared regularly on
Drudge.

American
reporters from the mainstream outlets that often dismiss Drudge as
a salacious rumour-monger often tip him off about their exclusives
or even the stories their editors will not run.

One
of the biggest surprises of the 2008 campaign has been the
connection between the Drudge Report and the Clinton campaign, who
has reportedly used the former Democratic party official Tracy
Sefl as an emissary.

But
the attempt to woo the man who came close to being her husband's
nemesis appears to have backfired. "The Clinton campaign has
clearly had an ability to move negative stuff about Edwards and
Obama in a way that we did not have," said Joe Trippi, chief
strategists to John Edwards, who recently dropped out of the 2008
race.

"They
tried to take some of the tactics that had worked against them and
use them for their own gain just when people were getting sick of
the kind of politics that's about what's the next bucket of blood
that's going to be dumped on Drudge."

Drudge
revels in his notoriety, the opaqueness of his methods and his
ability to cause trouble. The story about the Obama photograph led
to widespread condemnation of the Clinton campaign – prompting
some to wonder whether it had been deliberately placed to
discredit her.